Waterborne
by nb41
Summary: (Age of Ultron spoilers) In the Water of Sight all moments in time are one, just as they were at the Beginning. This is what makes it so powerful. It is also what makes it so dangerous.


Mild spoilers for Avengers: Age of Ultron. The Jane/Thor is background and just implied. If you haven't seen Age of Ultron this fic will probably not make any sense.

I know I can't be the only one who was hella disappointed in what we got of Thor's Naked Angry Bath. Here's my version of those events. (I didn't mind the concept of the Water of Sight at all, just how it was visualized.)

* * *

As Thor slips out of his clothes, Erik warns him, "This is dangerous."

"Divination is seldom otherwise," Thor says. He intends it as an agreement, but Erik scowls at him.

"So of course you're going to just throw yourself into it."

"I have little choice. I cannot ask another to do this. The vision was mine, and I am not sufficiently gifted in the magic governing the mind to call it forth again myself."

Erik sighs, and again Thor finds himself regretting the need to involve him. He's been through a good deal since they first met, and Thor can't help but hold himself accountable for much of it.

Sounding resigned, Erik says, "Just, try to come out of it alive, alright? I don't want to have to explain this to Jane. Or the police."

Thor nods and steps into the water, and winces. It's heavy with minerals, almost oily, and ice cold. "I intend to do so," he says, and wills his teeth to not chatter. Erik makes a low sound and steps back. He piles Thor's clothes up on a far rock.

Now that he's waist deep the cold has well and truly settled over him, and he's no longer shivering. He sinks lower, knowing he needs to submerge himself, yet as the cold hits his chest he feels apprehension claw at him. What if it doesn't work?

And what if it does?

He takes a handful of steadying breaths and steps into the deepest point of the pool. He sinks like a stone, and has to work to master the natural urge to panic. The shock of the cold is intense and reminds him of Mjölnir in his hand and a storm in his veins. He reaches out for that power out of instinct.

The Water takes him instead.

* * *

It starts with a voice: his mother's. He's missed her terribly, so it's not a surprise he would find her in the Water. She was quite skilled at divination herself.

"My beautiful son," Frigga says. "How I have missed you so."

She's dressed in swaths of gold and orange and red, a shimmering cloth suited to summer weather. He's wearing his simple leathers of dark gray and red, the kind he used to favor when he, Sif, Loki, and Haldorr would go hunting.

"Mother," he says, and takes her hands to kiss them. He feels her skin rather than some dreamlike semblance, and for a moment his mind struggles to accept her death is real.

She strokes his face. "The Water is a place where all moments in time may be as one, as they were in the very beginning, for a single moment."

He knows it's an explanation to his unvoiced reaction, and nods. "That is why I have come. Midgard is in great peril."

"And yet you fear there is greater peril still to be uncovered."

"Yes. This is only one strand in a larger work."

"Then let us walk, and see what we may."

They're standing on a beach of gleaming black sand. Dull-plumed waterbirds pick amongst the brilliant shells dotting the shoreline, hunting for treats cast up by the tide. A beautiful, hard blue ocean sends gentle waves at them. Two suns, one blue and one white, are sinking into the far horizon over the water, and the sky is colored in bands of green and dusty rose and gray as they set. Above the tide line marked by bone white driftwood and red-purple seaweed the sand piles into dunes flecked with pale blue and gray grasses that wave in the breeze off the ocean. The dunes come to an abrupt end at the foot of a series of towering, jagged, obsidian cliffs. From their current vantage point Thor can't see what might be on top of them. A mountain towers beyond the cliffs, dark and forbidding. Its highest peaks are lost in a bank of thick, white cloud.

"This was our home," he says without thinking, and he feels the truth of that statement in the marrow of his bones.

"Yes," Frigga says, and takes his hand. She begins to lead him down the beach. "Before we were Æsir crossing the stars in our great dragonships, before we fought with the Vanir and treated with the Ljósálfar, before we built ourselves a new home and named it Asgard, we were here."

"It was beautiful."

"So it was."

He's seen it in the Archives, of course, for all Æsir learn the history of the planet which birthed them and was lost countless millennia ago to the changing nature of one of the stars it orbited. Yet this cannot be just a construct born of half-dreamed childhood memories. The Water has stripped away the impersonality of recordings and rote teachings and left him with the raw moment itself. He can feel the pressure of his boots sinking into the wet, packed sand; he can smell the bitter and salty tang of the tide; he can feel the cool wind on his skin. He is here, which has not existed for time out of mind.

His gaze falls on a chambered, spiral shell which shines red and yellow and blue and purple in the twilight, and he stops.

"There was a child. She could wield entropy and the magic of the mind. She showed me a vision."

Frigga tilts her head. "Tell me of this vision."

"Asgard had—fallen, but all were celebrating." A wave slides up the shore far enough to splash their boots. "Heimdall cursed me a destroyer. His eyes...he said he still saw, but all he saw was death."

"What else?"

The shell glints at him again. "The stones," he says.

"Stones?"

"The Infinity Stones. Father told Jane and I of them when the Aether possessed her."

She raises her eyebrows at him. Her expression is encouraging, and he tries to follow the thread of the child's vision. The shell is red, and blue...and yellow.

"I believe another has surfaced."

His mother hmms and looks over at the cliffs. "Come. There is something you should see."

They make their way across the dunes to a split between two sheer rock walls. A precarious set of stairs has been carved into the cleft, meandering towards the top. His mother starts up, and after a moment's hesitation he follows.

Night falls as they climb. Strange constellations Thor has only ever seen in the Archives sprawl overhead, save for a quarter of the western horizon. That section of sky is awash in a nebula of orange and rose and gold Jane would have loved to see.

They climb onward. A dusty yellow moon in crescent phase rises, lending only a little more light than the firmament itself. The going is tough, and more than once his foot slips, but presently—once the moon is high overhead—they reach the top.

All around them is a grove of slim, narrow-limbed, silver-barked trees with pale green leaves flickering in a gentle breeze. His mother leads him along a small game trail for a short spell, until they come to a clearing. They stop at the outer edge.

Within it is a hulking, hunched figure in a dark purple, velvet robe. Thor cannot make out the person's face, but their hands are thick and broad and calloused. They're working at some manner of ritual, that he's sure of; there's a circle of small, smooth stones, with six points marked at even intervals by large, flat rocks. Each of these rocks bears an empty, rough-hewn bowl of milky-white crystal. The figure is murmuring under their breath in a low, rumbling voice. It sounds like a chant.

"What is this?" he whispers to his mother.

"Watch," she replies.

The figure out a long, thin, box of dark red wood out of their robe and opens it. Inside is a line of gemstones, six in total: blue, red, purple, yellow, green, orange. They take the gems and place each into one of the bowls. Four of the gems transform: the red gem bursts into a coiling, writing mass of red-black fluid; the blue gem contorts and blurs into a brilliant cube; the purple gem becomes encased in a dark gray, porous sphere; and the yellow gem is swallowed in a blue casing which is then housed in a spear.

No. Not a spear—a _scepter_.

The hunched being in the cloak steps into the circle and begins to walk inside it, sprinkling gold dust as they go. Their footsteps and the dust form a pattern. It is a hand, and the lines within it each connect to one of the gems.

The being steps clear. The gems and the gold dust all begin to glow, and their light bleeds together. Thor tries to look away, but this light is everywhere. It burns around him and into him and through him, and through everything.

His sight broadens, and now he sees the light is a hand, and the hand is spreading out over all of existence. It reaches the edges of the Universe and closes into a fist.

He's in the grove again. It's daytime, and everything has changed: where the ritual circle sat is now a blasted crater, and the trees have all been stripped of their leaves, rendering them barren and not unlike plaintive hands rising out of the black earth to an angry sky. Lead gray and deep blue clouds shift overhead, and he sees the two suns are at midday—though something is wrong with the white star. Its surface looks disturbed, shifting with overtones of gray. He feels a pressure building, like a force is pressing down on him, threatening to crush him into the ground.

The white star explodes in a sudden burst of brilliant white.

He knows what's coming; the shockwave of the nova will strip off the planet's atmosphere and maybe an upper layer of the surface, if not crush it all together. As it approaches the sky grows luminous with the shining, rippling curtains of green and yellow and blue aurorae. Then all of that is lost to white and yellow fire filling the whole of the sky.

Frigga is still here with him. She steps into his field of view and frames his face with her hands. Something changes and shifts. The fiery blaze around them is snuffed out like a candle. Frigga becomes indistinct, like an image on the surface of a disturbed lake. Darkness covers the burned husk of the planet, now the galaxy, now the whole of the Universe. This is not the Aether's darkness, because even that is a darkness in which life dwells (if not light). This is every ounce of life in all the Universe spent, leaving only ash and bones.

He feels chilled to the core as he realizes it isn't darkness at all. It's death.

"Why?" Thor asks her. His face is wet. Is it just the Water of Sight? Is it something else? Someone is calling his name.

Hers isn't the only voice that answers him, it's merely the strongest note in a chorus that stretches back over countless ages. Every Æsir who has ever been and might yet be speaks to him through the Water as her.

"Because that is his nature."

* * *

His face breaks the surface and he tries to drag in a lungful of air while simultaneously expelling an equal amount of water. Someone ( _Erik_ ) is attempting to drag him up to the edge of the pool and meeting with little success. Between his need to breathe and Erik's desire to get him out of the water there's a good deal of flailing and Erik yelling at him, but they work it out. Presently he's clinging to the rocks by his fingernails and coughing up all the water that he's swallowed.

"Are you alright?" Erik asks him. Thor is certain this isn't the first time he's said it.

"I, shall be." He wipes at his eyes. "How long?"

"Too long. I was afraid you were going to bring down the whole cave."

Thor peers up at Erik. "What do you mean?"

"It was a bit of a light show."

Thor smells it now: the air is heavy with the stench of burned rock. "I apologize. Were you hurt?"

"No, fortunately it all avoided me. I figured that meant you were still in control of it." He's eyeing Thor in a way which suggests he's no longer sure of that assessment.

Thor runs a hand over his face. Perhaps he was, in some way, keeping his powers in check. Or perhaps Mjölnir had chosen to protect Erik; it was known to do such things.

He hefts himself out of the Water. His legs tremble and feel uncertain, but urgency makes him unable to feel embarrassed about displaying weakness. "I must hurry. There is little time."

"How bad is it?"

He looks at Erik, thinking to say something reassuring, but his expression must be a sight, because Erik blanches.

"Ah, _that_ bad. Well then." He offers Thor a towel. "No time to waste."


End file.
